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Sunday, March 18, 2007 |
AlterNet: "Seymour Hersh's recent report that Iran-Contra veterans working out of Dick Cheney's office are using stolen funds from Iraq to arm al Qaeda-tied groups and foment a larger Sunni-Shia war is a very big deal."
Telegraph: "Two young sons of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks, are being used by the CIA to force their father to talk.
Yousef al-Khalid, nine, and his brother, Abed al-Khalid, seven, were taken into custody in Pakistan last September when intelligence officers raided a flat in Karachi where their father had been hiding.
Last night CIA interrogators confirmed that the boys were staying at a secret address where they were being encouraged to talk about their father's activities."
The CIA is using gestapo tactics. "Encouraged to talk about their father's activities"? You bet! As if these kids where well posted about their father's 'terrorist activities'! They are being held to pressure their father.
Wired: "Four leading Democratic senators have already fired off a missive (.pdf) to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales after the National Journal reported today that Gonzales helped squash a Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility investigation into warrantless wiretapping that could have probed his own actions."
LATimes: "As more Republicans called last week on Alberto R. Gonzales to resign, President Bush's aides began to look beyond the attorney general and focus on preventing the controversy over the firing of federal prosecutors from spreading - and endangering Karl Rove, the president's top political advisor."
ICH: "The stock market is about to crash. The only question is whether it will quickly drop down the elevator shaft or follow the jerky flight-path of a man pushed down a stairwell. Either way, the outcome will be the same; stocks will nose-dive, the dollar will plummet, and the bruised US economy will be splattered on the canvas like George Foreman in Rumble in the Jungle."
George W. Bush is a liability for America. He should be removed from office as soon as possible.
12:05:37 PM 
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ABCNews: "Thousands of Christians prayed for peace at an anti-war service Friday night at the Washington National Cathedral, kicking off a weekend of protests around the country to mark the fourth anniversary of the war in Iraq.
Afterward, participants marched with battery-operated faux candles through snow and wind toward the White House, where police began arresting protesters shortly before midnight."
NYTimes: "Thousands of demonstrators marched to the Pentagon on Saturday to mark both the fourth anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq and the 40th anniversary of the march along the same route to protest the Vietnam War."
Photos.
Yahoo: "Tens of thousands of anti-war demonstrators marched in Spanish cities on Saturday in what organizers said were Europe's biggest protests to mark four years of conflict in Iraq.
The largest demonstration was in Madrid where organizers estimated around 400,000 protestors, though city authorities put the total in the tens of thousands. It was one of around 100 anti-war demonstrations across Spain involving cities including Barcelona, Valencia and Seville."
RawStory: "Tens of thousands of protesters marched to the Pentagon's doorstep Saturday demanding 'US out of Iraq Now', ahead of the fourth anniversary of the US invasion."
11:53:53 AM
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Susan Sontag: "A great writer of fiction both creates - through acts of imagination, through language that feels inevitable, through vivid forms - a new world, a world that is unique, individual; and responds to a world, the world the writer shares with other people but is unknown or mis-known by still more people, confined in their worlds: call that history, society, what you will.
But of course, the primary task of a writer is to write well."
What you so often see is that people read (if they read at all) to be distracted from the real world, to have a good laugh; in short to be amused and entertained. That's the realm of television (and please forget about its informational value or task in the present time, it no longer has any - on the contrary, the task of television seems to be disinformation). Some people don't even notice the beauty of the written language. The only thing they are focused on is the plot, the story. They can't be bothered about the rest.
No harm, you would say. Well, not really. Quite often every attempt to point to the real meaning(s) or value of a novel, to elucidate it or attempt to understand the connotations to the real world, are ridiculed and torpedoed. They only want to be amused and will twist anything that does not conform with their own limited views.
You will find many of these among the collectors of every edition of their beloved writer. Fortunately not all of the collectors fall into this category. But there is a caste of literature groupies that resembles more that of stalkers and pop fans.
11:40:00 AM
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© Copyright 2008.
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